medieval

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations for our 47th annual conference. The conference will be held in Denver, CO from March 31 to April 2, 2016.

The 2016 theme is "Creation" and CEA invites papers and panels that explore the literary, the rhetorical, the pedagogical and the professional "creations" of our fields. What do we create, hope our students will create, see or reconstruct in the creations of others?

The special panel chair for Book History welcomes proposals for papers and panels addressing the following topics:

Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC)

Global climate change, soil depletion, the enclosure of the commons, the acidification of the oceans, ground water contamination, mass extinctions: in a context in which the environmental crises of the day seem to us so intractable, at such large scales and dominated by such powerful interests, the

First Year Seminar courses provide a way for first year students to undertake the rigors of intellectual study in an environment supportive of the transition they undergo as they enter college. As such, First Year Seminars can be sources of tension, discovery, frustration, and connection. From the instructor's point of view, the experience of teaching a first year seminar can cause new understandings to emerge—understandings of disciplinary value, of first year students, of institutional culture, and of effective pedagogy.

In the past two decades, universities, professional organizations, and businesses around the western world have placed a great emphasis on celebrating diversity on their grounds, welcoming members, students, faculty, and employees from different ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, and class identities. This trend toward embracing otherness has often been instituted and protected by laws and policies in different countries, and employees have been trained to effectively maintain agreeable and harmonious work atmosphere with each other.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATIONApollon invites undergraduate students to get published in, review submissions for, or help edit the sixth issue of our peer-reviewed eJournal, Apollon. By publishing superior examples of undergraduate academic work, Apollon highlights the importance of undergraduate research in the humanities. Apollon welcomes submissions that feature image, text, sound, and a variety of presentation platforms in the process of showcasing the many species of undergraduate research.

Ecology is concerned with the relationship between living creatures and their environments. Increasingly, this relationship is considered to be culturally, as well as biologically, constructed. In recent years the fields of 'eco-criticism' and 'animal studies' have developed as strong currents within the study of medieval romance. Animals, landscapes and other features of the natural world are no longer seen as exclusively decorative, tangential or symbolic but as agents and characters that can respond to each other as well as humans and animals.

The Medieval Romance Society is hosting three connected sessions that will explore ecologies in medieval romances and related texts. The sessions will be defined by the following themes:

Essay proposals are invited for Teaching Space, Place, and Literature, a volume in the MLA's Options for Teaching series to be edited by Robert T. Tally, Jr. This volume aims to survey a broad expanse of literary critical, theoretical, and historical territory in presenting both an introduction to teaching spatial literary studies and an essential guide to scholarly research being conducted in this burgeoning field. Exploring key topics and pedagogical strategies for teaching issues of space, place, and mapping in literary and cultural studies, this volume will include valuable information for both specialists and nonspecialists in spatiality studies, and the essays should be of interest to teachers of undergraduate- and graduate-level courses.

The Birmingham Journal of Literature and Language (BJLL) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal published annually, both electronically and in print by The University of Birmingham. It includes submissions from postgraduate students, alumni and external students based in the UK, specializing in Literature and Language from all periods and cultures.

The BJLL is seeking short pieces ('Notes') for inclusion in Volume VII (2015). These can be on any topic of academic interest, including (but not limited to):

Call for a chapter to fill a gap in an edited collection entitled Missing, Presumed Dead: the Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination.

The dead or absent mother is a recurring feature in Western cultural productions, from Greek myths through folktales, Shakespeare and Dickens to contemporary literature such as Miriam Toew's A Complicated Kindness (2004), television, and films such as Finding Nemo (2003) and The Road (2009). The mother might be dead at the outset, or die during the narrative. Her death might be a disaster, propelling the child into danger; a blessing, saving the child from an abusive or inappropriate parent and making way for a more suitable guardian; or of no consequence.

Following Foucault's description of sodomy as "that utterly confused category," literary scholars like Jonathan Goldberg and Alan Bray, among others, have continued to theorize the ways in which sodomy denotes no fixed set of bodily acts, but rather persists as a mobilizable category with social, political, and juridical valences. Sodomy necessarily persists, that is, in excess of the material bodily configurations it purports to police. Even so, much prevailing scholarship nonetheless returns to anal penetration as a presumptive and primary figuration in the discourse of sodomitical, disorderly, and/or illicit sexual acts.